Snape at the beach aka: Sempiternity- Short story- Snape!
by Tablax Clipper
Summary: Writing challenge: 30 paraphrased Shakespeare quotes hidden in the text. See if you can find them all Snape goes to the beach. Set in the summer of 1983, Snape's school holidays.- A sequel to The Grants Artifacts but doesn't give anything away. just a good way to flesh out some characters.


_A Snape and 'I' first person dialogue with 30 paraphrased shakespeare quotes hidden in the text. See if you can find them all, bonus points if you quote the plays. Set in the summer of 1983, Snapes school holidays._

The sunlight fell in a shaft, eaking out a path between two pointed rooftops, spilling golden eferesence across yellow london bricks and cobblestones. Diagon Alley smelled of soot and butterbeer. Sickley, ashen, old, but with the dust burn promise of heated stone and hot days. I looked into empty shop faces, observed how the signs creaked in the wind and I basked in the silence.

"The good time of day to you,"

Silence shattered.

I cast sideways daggers at the purple swaddled bliss pirate. Stealing my solitude with his morning affirmations. It _Was_ a good time of day, it _had been_ a good time of day. No longer. Raped. Destroyed. The illusion of perfection trampled by the polite greeting of a marading homosapien. Purple Pirate smiled, almost apologetic as he past. I guess my surley introspections showed in the crease of my eyebrows.

"To you too," my words sounded thick. I cursed myself for allowing the societal pressure to be polite override my meditation.

The patch of sunlight faded as Purple Pirate crossed it's boundary. A bell rang out from a shop down the road. Somebody coughed. The moment was truly over. I gave a heavy sigh, which made my shoulders rise and my breasts heave uncomfortably against the confines of my dress, a dress too warm for the day this would become. I clicked my neck and began to walk towards Knockturn Alley.

Here, sunlight didn't settle so easily. The alley was comprised of the backs of others' houses turned into shops to sell less than legal wears, with dark narrow lanes winding from shop door to shop door. I paused outside Mr Mulpeppers Apothecary and read below a sign saying 'do not ask me for Unicorn Blood' that he was closed.

"You!"

I turned to face the noise and met a man with his wand drawn, an eager glint in his shining eyes. Tongue darted from thin lips and thin nose like a finger pointing looked in my direction.

"You!" he shouted again and raised his wand higher.

I pointed to myself, "Are you asking me a question?" I asked, "Or telling me an answer?"

"I came here to fight with you," he declared. All too triumphant considering he had not won yet.

" _We come hither to fight with you,"_ I mocked.

He paused. His wand fell. I'd made it awkward and he'd lost his passion, but he gained a smile as his free hand reached to his pocket and drew out a clipping. He chucked it at my feet and I stooped to pick it up without breaking eye contact with him.

"What is it?"

He laughed, his wand rose again. "Have a look."

I opened the clipping without taking my eyes from him, then, judging him to be waiting for some kind of response before he attacked I deemed it safe to look down. I saw myself, compromised, exposed, a friend of a hated werewolf. I turned my eyes back to him. "It's not what you think."

"They say you are a traitor."

" _They_ say a lot of things," I muttered, wishing that the shop would open and I could be swallowed into it's dark embrace.

"They say you helped him," he looked more pointed, as if his words would make me rise in a fury impassioned and give him excuse to attack. I blinked, slowly, and tarried for a while, expecting him to make the first move.

"Are you waiting for something?" I asked.

He licked his lips again, the corner of his mouth twitched. He looked so young, and yet so desperately conflicted.

"I don't know what delays you from action?" I continued. "I am waiting myself, as you can see, so I do have a little bit of time for you, however, I am not a Time Turner; my patience, and my availability, is finite."

He moved into an attacking stance, ready for a dule, but he'd lost his nerve long ago. Behind me the shop sign turned from closed to open. "Now's your chance," I urged.

His face was turning red, his eyes darting to the shop front and back, "shit," he cursed, turned and ran. I watched him disappear around the corner. Behind me the shop door opened and my friend stood in the doorframe and looked up at the sky. He took a deep, endulgent inhale of the morning air.

"Do you see, over there, that far off cloud that is almost in the shape of a camel?"

I turned and followed his outstretched finger, despite the freshness of the day and the promise of atmospheric warmth his arm was corseted tightly into a sleeve of thick black, and trussed up tight with minute buttons. He appeared sewn into his clothes. I knew he slept in them sometimes, when late nights, too much elfen wine and stacks of marking kept him from the half hour it would take to emancipate himself.

"You clown, it's a horse."

"Classification of one from the other is not beyond my talents. Unfortunately, it seems you are not graced with my power of observation. It is quite clearly the shape of a camel. Note the two humps? Do try to be more observant."

He overproununced his T's and Q's, it made him sound clipped and immensily unimpressed. I sniggered, and was not proud by the sound that emanated from my person. He gave a thin lipped smile, which told me he was more amused by me than his own quip, and he turned on his heal and went back into the shop.

"Are you quite done here?" I asked, noting that the shelves of the shop appeared to be restocked with various bottles and potions.

"Not quite," he studied me with glinting black eyes, leaving his mouth open a slither when he finished speaking, as if he would say more, but I spoke first.

"How much longer?"

"A day, perhaps two and then I will apparate."

"To…?"

He turned and looked at me, as if I should know better. I made an exasperated noise, like a child, and he shot me a warning glance.

"I am not in the mood to fulfill the role of your teacher," he snapped. "Work it out yourself."

Why he continued to spend his summers up north in a decaying mining town affected by the muggle coal strikes, bleak as dickensian sin was beyond me. He lived in a tomb; The remains of his mother transfigured on his bookshelf and a lone cutting from the Daily Prophet showing his greatest regret, Lily, pinned unceremoniously to his childhood bedroom wall. I'd had too many arguments about how unhealthy it was, too many that ended with a frown and a shrug and a wall of pain he could not break through. He loved her, then he got her killed, and now he couldn't move on. He was haunted. "At least come away with me for a little while."

"I am here in Diagon Alley brewing potions for a friend. Hence, I am away."

"London is not a vacation. Working outside of work is not a vacation."

"Says the girl who is constantly _on the make_."

"You make me sound like a whore."

His face was a mask. I pursed my lips and wondered why he insinuated that about me. I'd slept with more people than him for sure but he didn't complain about my affections when he was their object. Perhaps he was still sore about the first time I left him, when Lily Potter died and I felt betrayed. Perhaps the second time, last christmas when I put my job first. He told me he was fine with it. He said he understood. He _said._ And it wasn't like I'd been with anybody else since christmas, not in Albania, not after.

"I brought you a letter, and a couple of pigeons, here," from a bag around my waist I took out the items. The pigeons were shot from the sky using an unforgivable curse at a friends manor house in Devon, killed in a particular way to make them most potent for an illegal potion. Requested by my _friend_ , I suspected, in an attempt to see me. I confess I had been avoiding him; my own actions shamed me. Severus wrote, in a letter to Lucius Malfoy... _They have to be from Devon, they have to be a certain species of wood pigeon, not any old bird will do._ Not any old bird will do...perhaps that was about me too. He could be cruel, his humour took no prisoners.

But, what of the letter I carried for him? Narcissa Malfoy had said it arrived via Owl for him. She didn't recognise the hand writing and was worried that if she opened it on his behalf it would curse her. I thought the handwriting looked feminine. It curled too fancy, it was too precise and that made me mad.

"Good," he muttered and upon taking the items from me he disappeared into the back room and kicked the door closed.

Clattering on the stairs turned my attention to the right hand door behind the counter. A wizened old man rotund in the belly and thin in the face with unfocused eyes and the twitching hands of a drug addict paused in his distracted discompose to study me. "Good dawning to you," he muttered. "I have met you before have I not?"

"You have," I told him. I found I wished to tell him more, simply as a way to fill the vacuum created by two people without the words to fill the void of their own inept sense of self consciousness. "I am a friend of Severus. I've brought him some gifts and I'm hoping to convince him to spend some time away."

"But I know you from another time," the man told me. "I do," he came round the counter, too dramatically I thought, grabbing onto the side and moving in sweeps, his body conveying a sense of urgency, a kind of excitement. "Yes," he slid to me, and I stepped back to keep a distance between us. "Do you remember? Can you see back into the abyss of time? Do you remember me, do you remember the service I provided for the cause?"

I tilted my head, I did, but I would not say. I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of feeling important. I didn't want to bind myself to him in friendship. "I'm sure you have provided many services to many people," I smiled. "I must have been happy with your custom, you are alive still, after all."

He chortled, "Oh no, you remember," he told me. His face transformed with glee, "You remember," he said again. "The potion I brewed for Caesar, to send greeting to the Queen of Egypt," he laughed, "and cut that baby right out of her didn't it? Cut it right away and wasn't Ceasar so pleased with my potion he commended me personally."

For a moment I had no idea what he was talking about, but then I remembered, The Dark Lord and Bellatrix Lestrange. He hadn't been pleased that she'd decided to have a baby with her husband. I'd assumed he had been jealous. He was always jealous of something, jealous and cruel.

"She didn't know what he fed her and she cursed him to high heaven when she found out. He laughed as she screamed that the gods would plague him. _The gods will plague thee._ He laughed so much tears rolled down his cheeks. Then he hurt her, just for the sport of it. Just to remind her who called the shots. But her curse made good, in the end, didn't it?" the old man boasted, wrung his hands and ran his teeth over his chapped lips.

"You'd do well to hold your tongue," Severus said from the doorway. Considering he had previously referred to the man as his friend I had to wonder over the nature of it. "It doesn't do to dwell on the past or speculate on the nature of things you have no idea about."

"I…"

Severus looked down his nose at the man. Who turned his watery eyes up to the younger and gave a rye smile, "I'll not trouble you yet Severus, as to question you about your fortune this morning. it's quite clear you have a head of frogs. Look, two have made your eyebrows jump together."

I wondered at the strangeness of this statement, but Severus seemed to find it amusing and I noted the wine stain on his lips from a night spent drinking. The older man smiled, turned and went back to the serving counter, "Your friend wants to take you away for the day. I think you should let her. Not that I don't appreciate your help but you have not left the lab for five days now and all you do in the evening is try out what you have made in the day."

Severus turned a lighter shade of white.

"Quick," I laughed. "Give me your hand and let me feel your pulse, I think you just died."

"Where would you take me?"

"I have a good location in mind."

"I feel like _good_ is subjective in this scenario."

I laughed and held out my hand to him, he looked at it like it was a disease. "All you will need," I told him, grabbing his arm anyway and dragging him from the shop. "Is yourself. Come along."

Snape grumbled, complaining that I wouldn't tell him where we were going or what I intended to do with him. At one point he spat "I am sick of this false world," when I pointed out that there would be muggles and we would have to be careful to hide our magic from them. Perhaps even change our appearance to 'fit in'. I side along apparited us to the cornish coast, where the water was brilliant turquoise and the waves formed corduroy lines which traveled into the shore with a lazy inevitability. High on the clifftop I felt like a gliding bird, and as the day was heating to a point of unpleasantness already, I enjoyed the sharp breeze that mussed my hair.

Next to me Severus tilted his head into the sunlight, his hooded eyes closed for a moment, and when he opened them again he looked wretched and sad. I ran my fingers across the back of his hand and when he didn't move away from me I slid mine into his and rested my head on his shoulder. Freely I pointed down to the beach where an empty stretch of golden sand lay waiting. "I have found thee," I giggled, "Look, how perfect it is."

Severus looked along my outstretched arm, "What am I looking at?" he asked.

"Witchcraft drew me hither," I told him putting on the kind of voice muggle children used when pretending to be spooky. "The beach is inaccessible for Muggles, it was used by the Dark Lord to smuggle reinforcements in by boat during the war. There's not much surf, and there are dry caves for people to sleep in.

Severus allowed me to lead him across a cliff path which etched down to the beach via a jutting weathered stone formation in the shape of an arch. On both sides of our rock the land fell away sharpley and we picked our way down using our hands to steady us, and our feet like slides along the rock face. Severus said nothing as he followed me, the exercise, combined with his silent hangover seemed to be more than he could handle. The day was hot, and by the time our feet crunched on the soft white sand his skin was waxen and beads of sweat formed at his temples. Now he was down on the beach he slid his hands into his pockets and looked around with a long face, I knew he was already resenting the climb back up.

"Oh let me be boiled to death with melancholy!" I sneered at him, rolling my eyes as I mocked him. "Let me stew in misery. Let me burst into flames least I allow myself to smile."

Severus looked at me like I was mad. In response I began to undress.

"What…?"

I turned my back to him, chucked off my clothes and stood naked in the sunlight, laughing at his prudishness then I turned and ran into the water shrieking as the salt sea turned my skin to ice. "It's cold!" I called to him as I waded out to my neck. I knew he was muttering a snarky remark under his breath to my stating the obvious. I swam a little then ducked under, the ache in my lungs at pressure was comforting. I swam to the bottom, ran my hands across the smooth stones, charming my eyes so I could open them without salt water stinging and enjoying the dark green and yellow ocean world.

I surfaced, he remained as before, in full dress robes, sewn in, the image of repression standing on the beach watching me and doing nothing. Was he made uncomfortable by my inhibition? I had to know.

"You miserable git," I shouted from the water. "Come on, speak!"

Severus raised his hand and extended his middle finger, then he sat heavy on the sand and started to unbutton himself. I bobbed for a while, watching him, but he took so long I lost attention and returned to my underwater kingdom.

When I surfaced again he stood ankle deep, cloak and overcoat off and sleeves rolled up. I could make out the dark mark on his arm, not yet totally faded. His hair waved a little in the sea breeze and he appeared to be relaxing. I swam to shore and bobbed a few feet from him as I studied him.

"How do you like it?"

"Good enough," he muttered. "I can't swim."

That surprised me more than I cared to admit. The idea of being _unable_ to enjoy the water, unable to make passage through it, to swim under it, to be held in it's supportive embrace, the _idea_ of it upset me.

"You can't?" I asked. "At all?"

"I grew up in Cokeworth, the only waterways around there were polluted."

"So get out of your clothes and come here. I'll teach you."

He hesitated. He drew his foot through the water and looked out across the blue ocean. "What if I get swept out?"

I turned to face the horizon, enjoying the sensation as a lazy wave picked me up and moved me closer to the shore. "Are you frightened?"

"I'm too old to learn."

"Shall I quote you on that in other areas of your life Severus Snape? You are a man who knows a warlike charge, so get out of your clothes and get in beside me."

Still he hesitated. "You said it's cold."

"I can see you sweating, and besides, there are warm patches," I smiled, "I haven't urinated, if that's what you are thinking."

"It wasn't."

"Afraid to get wet?"

Severus pursed his lips, "Instead of commenting on my cleanliness, perhaps you should focus on the fact that oceans are contaminated muggle dumping grounds full of oil, plastics and sewage."

I laughed and pushed up from the bottom so I lay back in the water, the sun warming my stomach and thighs. "Join me Severus," I urged. "You're missing out." He didn't, he went beachcombing instead and I swam out into deeper colder water and then back to shore where I basked in sun warmed patches and dove down to look at minute fish and crabs.

I checked often on Severus, who was content to migrate between the caves, the beach, the rockpools and the waters edge. He made a fire from drift wood and transfigured his cloak into a beach towel. I puzzled over his need to create fire for a while, the day was hot, but I supposed it gave him purpose. Perhaps he thought it was romantic.

By lunchtime we were starved, but we didn't want to leave. I lay on the rocks, still naked as I dried in the sun and we spoke about what to do next, which lead to a conversation about what we had done when we were apart. Which lead to a conversation about the war.

"The web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together," Severus told me. As he lounged. He was topless now, it was too hot for clothes. He'd stopped vanishing his hair from his chest in my absence, it wasn't thick but it was dark and I didn't like it much. It hid some of his tattoos, a selection of dark magic protection wards and childhood stick and poke symbols done by his friends Mulciber and Avery. "Did you really help the werewolfs?"

"For my sins," I muttered. "As payment for Egypt."

"A lot of those creatures died, some would say you did the wizarding community a favor."

I closed my eyes and said nothing to him but my skin was burning and I knew I would soon have to run back into the water to cool off. Severus sat in shade and used a cooling charm. I turned onto my front and groaned as my skin rubbed together then I got up and started back to the water. Severus followed me, he paused by the waters edge then he stripped. His body was better than I remembered it, he'd been working out, he took things like that seriously but he would never admit to anybody he was doing it. He confided to me once that he didn't want to waste time making his body work as it naturally should, he'd rather focus his talents on making his magic stronger. He waded in to his knees, then he paused and looked back to shore. I bobbed, silently waiting for him, and he took a few more steps, pulling a face as as the cold washed over his middle. I sank under the water and swam around him.

"How now, my pretty knave," I said as I resurfaced, running my hands across his body. "How are you doing?" I pressed myself to him and kissed his sholder.

"Now what do I do?" he asked.

-O-O-

We walked from the cove to the muggle town and got ourselves fish and chips, climbing up the steep path to landfall for the sheer fun of it rather than apperating. Well, I found it fun, I'm not sure that Severus enjoyed it. He wasn't used to eating muggle food, or paying in muggle coin, and the muggles looked at him like he was in fancy dress. They looked at me like it too, but I'd transfigured my clothes to be looser and I'd taken the sleeves away to keep my arms cool. As we ate we walked along the harbourside, watching seals play in the water below. Smelling the scent of worn out evening dust and dried fish. Listening to seagulls screeches and the far away chimes of rigging as it smacked against the beams of the ships moored. As the light slowly left the world we stood arm in arm on the end of a jetty looking up at the midnight blue sky where Jupiter was just visible.

"O Jupiter," Severus muttered, "How weary are my spirits."

I knew he was quoting something, he moved me in front of him, wrapped his arms around me and rested his head on top of mine. For a long time we said nothing, content to look out at the stars and be lost to feeling. Later we walked to a muggle pub, and we sat with pints of beer next to a wide fire. Above the bar a TV showed a cinematic dramatisation of Macbeth where three witches recited their poem to the rapt attention of Severus.

"I don't know what to say," I confessed after a moment's silence. "I feel like we have said everything we need to ever say and yet have said nothing at all."

Severus smiled at me, it was a warm smile, a teasing one. "Lets stay."

I looked him over, wondering if he were joking.

"Let's stay here for a little while, let's eat and swim and…" he stopped talking, his face fell. I turned to look where he was looking and spotted a man in the doorway with a scar down his face.

"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes-" the three witches cackled as Macbeth entered. I looked to Severus, wondering whom played this Macbeth in the doorway.

His hand went to his wand.

The man in the doorway flinched, as if stung, then went for his own. I watched, shocked and a little confused as Severus attacked first, shooting a stunning hex, which was repelled and a counter jinx sent back, also repelled, their fighting grew in intensity until tables were flipped and muggles scattered. All I could do was contain the people into the bar, not wanting any muggles to escape and cause us trouble with the ministry.

Severus brought down part of the ceiling. The other man flooded the floor. One of Severus' deflected curses shattered all the glass behind the bar. Muggles screamed and then the attacker, slashed across the arm from Severus's own spells and limping from a dead leg curse collapsed onto the wet floor groaning. Severus shuffled towards him, wand extended, and I heard him sneer "I told you, I warned you; come not within the measure of my wrath and still you seek me out. How? How did you find me?"

the attacker rasped, "Are you going to do it Severus?" he goaded. "Are you going to do it like you did to her? Where art thou, death? I have taken one dear to you too, I've taken her and she is dead."

I stood frozen. _Her?_ So he had been with somebody else in my time away. He had wanted to punish me as I had him. What hadn't he told me? What had he done? I considered leaving him to clean up his own mess. I considered returning to my seat and watching the rest of Macbeth but the Scottish Play was a long one and the witches were only act four. I wondered if he would be able to be honest with me in the time it took for the play to run its course, or would he be like Macbeth, sinking further and further into his own narrative until he was blinded by it. I studied my hands, wondering if like Lady Macbeth I would see the blood dripping from them and turn insane from suspicion and worry.

"She's dead, Severus Snape, just as you killed my wife, I took your lover. O ill-starr'd wench, she's dead and you can't get her back," he started to laugh. "For what is in this world but grief and woe?" he hissed and poked a finger at Severus.

"Dead?" Severus hissed. "You fool I hardly knew her."

The man coughed, he was dying but not by Severus' hand. I saw a vile of potion roll from between his fingers. "Do you recognise…" he could hardly speak now. "Do you recognise the potion?"

"It is the same I made for your wife," Severus told him and from his own pocket he took a letter, the one I had given him that morning. "She wrote one final letter, to warn me what you might do when you found out. You can't tell an oyster how to make its shell, I did as she bid me to do. I did not murder her, she was set on her path."

"You aided her for gold."

"I aided her," Severus lent in closer to him "out of curiosity, to test a new potion. A painless one. Tell me...how do you feel?"

"I am afraid…." the man whispered.

"Conscience doth make cowards of us all," Snape growled. The man reached up to him opened his mouth to say something but all that came from him was air. He sagged. The muggles cowered in their corners. Severus looked at me but he did not seem himself, behind his eyes was a deep seated rage quenched. It was The same look he had when we finished in bed together and all I could think in that moment was of one final quote from the Tempest, "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."


End file.
